Corrections officials have agreed to improve conditions for prisoners in Georgia’s most restrictive solitary confinement facility, which an expert had said risked causing prisoners psychological harm.
The proposed changes would settle a lawsuit filed by prisoners in the Special Management Unit of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. Their agreement, reached last month with Corrections Department officials and now awaiting a judge’s approval, says prisoners will be allowed out of their cells at least four hours each weekday, won’t be housed in the unit longer than two years except in certain narrowly defined circumstances, and will have access to educational programming and materials, among other changes.
Psychology professor and prison expert Craig Haney wrote in a report submitted to the court last year by the prisoners’ lawyers that he had toured maximum-security prisons in roughly two dozen states, and this unit was “one of the harshest and most draconian” he had seen.
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